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of Sinatra, and The Flatbush Girls Who Would Lay Down Their Lives for Frank Sinatra Fan Club, as well as the Frank Sinatra Fan and Mahjong Club, consisting of forty middle-aged Jewish women who met to play their favorite game while listening to Sinatra songs. Evans said more than two hundred fifty of the clubs published their own newspapers. Most reporters laughed, so Evans sent them copies of Frank Fare, the newspaper of a Newark, New Jersey, fan club called The Sighing Society of Sinatra Swooners, in which the editor wrote, “Cynical singers and orchestra leaders sneered at him at first, but we in the deepness of our hearts knew that our Frankie was straight and true and that someday he would be known and loved all over the world.”

Evans circled this particular passage, and reporters dutifully wrote it up. He courted the press assiduously, knowing that published stories about Frank’s fanatic fans and their bizarre behavior would set a pattern that even more youngsters would want to adopt. Consequently, he worked hard to arrange as many interviews as possible. He even devised a mass radio interview with two hundred high school editors quizzing Frank over WAAT in Jersey City, thereby ensuring stories in two hundred high school papers.

From the start, George Evans played Frank as a family man, the boy-next-door answer to girlish fantasies. Frank cooperated completely. He sat for every interview that George arranged and threw open his home to reporters and photographers. He posed patiently for any pictures they wanted to take of him and Big Nancy and Little Nancy in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the nursery. He put on a sailor cap and posed for pictures leaning on a lawn mower in the backyard. Soon, so much fan mail poured in that he hired two full-time secretaries to handle the letters and requests for photographs. This he did willingly. “I believe in publicity,” he said. “It’s the best thing to spend money on.”

When Evans could not “sell” an interview, he invented a news event, like Frank Sinatra Day in Philadelphia, the “Why I Like Frank Sinatra” contest in Detroit, or New York’s “I Swoon for Sinatra” contest. With Evans at the controls, the bobby-soxer brigade quickly grew into thousands of ecstatic, shrieking, rapturous fans.

“We hired girls to scream when he sexily rolled a note,” said Jack Keller, who was George Evans’s partner on the West Coast. “The dozen girls we hired to scream and swoon did exactly as we told them. But hundreds more we didn’t hire screamed even louder. Others squealed, howled, kissed his pictures with their lipsticked lips, and kept him a prisoner in his dressing room between shows at the Paramount. It was wild, crazy, completely out of control.”

So spectacular was the Sinatra publicity campaign that Billboard awarded Evans a scroll in 1943 for the “Most Effective Promotion of a Single Personality,” which Evans proudly displayed on his office wall. “Frankie is a product of crowd psychology,” he told the Chicago Tribune News Service. “And the girls loved it. Understand, it was the Sinatra influence that provided the initial impetus. But it was I, Evans, who saw the possibilities in organized and regimented moaning.… It’s a big snowball now, and Frankie’s riding to glory on it.”

With the zeal of an empire builder, the devoted press agent began composing a biographical sketch of his client, which he distributed to the press. This was one of his most creative endeavors. After shrewdly assessing what the public wanted in its new boy singer, Evans lopped two years off Frank’s age, asserting that the twenty-eight-year-old bobby-sox idol had been born in 1917 rather than 1915. That was intended to make him closer in age to his young fans. Ignoring Frank’s expulsion from school, he elevated the high school dropout who had no interest in sports to a graduate of Demarest High who ran track, played football, leaped for basketballs, and sang in the glee club. Evans then promoted him from a lowly fly boy who bundled newspapers for The Jersey Observer to a full-fledged sports reporter. Both immigrant parents